Startup Plugs Gmail Into GitHub Into HipChat Into...

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Startup Plugs Gmail Into GitHub Into HipChat Into...

All those web applications finding their way into the world's businesses? Zapier wants to help them talk to each other.

On Wednesday, the three-man Mountain View, California-based startup unleashed an online service that connects web apps commonly used in the modern office, including Google's Gmail, the online database service Basecamp, the chat service HipChat, the popular code development service GitHub, and more. In short, you can arrange for an action in one application to trigger a complementary action in another, and even move data between applications.

The pitch is that this will streamline the lives of business people everwhere. "We ... saw users wasting a lot of time copying and pasting data from one app to another," says Zapier co-founder Wade Foster. "So we thought it would be awesome if there was a service that let you integrate everything."

Existing tools web services such Yahoo Pipesand IFTTT provide a similar means of connecting disparate web applications, but these are designed for the average consumer. Foster and his co-founders, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, have built Zapier specifically with businesses in mind.

The startup is part of a growing number of software and hardware outfits slipping their products into the world's businesses through the back door. The idea is that individual business employees will start using Zapier on their own, and then their employers will see good reason to pay Foster and company for use of the service.

"We don't have to track down businesses and convince them," Foster says. "They know they have a need for it."

Foster sees the service being used by, say, a software development team. The team could use Basecamp's project management software to track the development of a new software tool, Foster says, and GitHub to oversee the actually coding. It could then use Zapier to connect the two services, so that if, say, a new "To Do" item is added to Basecamp, a new "Issue" is added to GitHub.

Currently, Zapier works with over 30 online services in one way or another, but it is still a very young product. Development on the service itself began in October.

Foster says Zapier is currently working to dovetail its service with SalesForce.com, the online customer relationship management service, and Yammer, a social network designed for businesses.